Snakes enjoy warming themselves in the sun

Love to trek this area’s dusty trails, but I also stay alert for the warning buzz of a rattler’s rattle.

Not that I expect to see one of the snakes, but I’m being prudent.

It’s this dry heat and the partially parched landscape. It’s the powdery clouds of dirt that puff up with each step. Besides, I’m told, a rattler likes nothing better than to coil on a hot flat rock and soak up the high noon sun.

“This is snake season,” said Eric Morgan, BLM manager of Salinas’ next door neighbor, the Fort Ord National Monument. “It’s common to see them sunning.”

Yet, while snakes are out and about, rattlesnakes are but a few among them, Morgan said. I hike, and I’ve seen maybe three to include one last Saturday. It wasn’t on monument lands, though, but crossing the stretch of old Reservation Road by the Toro Creek Bridge. I braked to let it cross.

We’ve had a few snakes in our neighborhood, too. My guess is they slithered down off the brown hills and onto our little patch of suburban order parked along River Road.

Snake season also means chances of seeing one of several species is high if you’re routinely outdoors.

“There are a lot of king snakes and gopher snakes and I scoot them off the roadways and the riding trails,” Morgan said.

The other day, for example, Morgan was driving his truck along Oil Can Road on monument land, when he came upon two women with strollers. They stood frozen in their tracks frightened by the presence on the road of a 4-foot snake stretched out sunning itself. Turned out to be a harmless gopher snake, and Morgan simply shooed it away from a place where it was in danger of being hit by a truck or mountain bike or by a stroller for that matter.

California has several kinds of rattlesnakes, all potentially dangerous.

So don’t try to have your picture snapped with one. No “selfies” with the rattler coiled in stirke position. No trying to pat it on the head. Rather, stay at least 5 feet from the snake, experts said. Give the snake room, and it will gladly leave. Don’t try to kill it or annoy it. That’s when most bites occur. Alert others to the snake’s location.

Snakes are apart of nature and of valley life, to include the area’s public lands -- and that’s the way it should be.

There is another animal that does bite more consistently and that has nothing to do with fanged serpents slithering across creation. That animal would be off-leash dogs, Morgan said.

The highest percentage of snakebites, by the way, happens to men 18-to-25, who have a high amount of alcohol in their blood, Morgan said.